What are Darwinists so afraid of?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 27, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern

As a doctoral student at the University of Kansas in the '90s, I found that my professors came in all stripes, and that lazy ideas didn't get off easy. If some professor wanted to preach the virtues of communism after it had failed miserably in the Soviet Union, he was free to do so, but students were also free to hear from other professors who critically analyzed that position.

Conversely, students who believed capitalism and democracy were the great engines of human progress had to grapple with the best arguments against that view, meaning that in the end, they were better able to defend their beliefs.

Such a free marketplace of ideas is crucial to a solid education, and it's what the current Kansas science standards promote. These standards, like those adopted in other states and supported by a three-to-one margin among U.S. voters, don't call for teaching intelligent design. They call for schools to equip students to critically analyze modern evolutionary theory by teaching the evidence both for and against it.

Some want to protect Darwinism from the competitive marketplace by overturning the critical-analysis standards. My hope is that these efforts will merely lead students to ask, What's the evidence they don't want us to see?

Under the new standards, they'll get an answer. For starters, many high-school biology textbooks have presented Haeckel's 19th century embryo drawings, the four-winged fruit fly, peppered moths hidden on tree trunks and the evolving beak of the Galapagos finch as knockdown evidence for Darwinian evolution. What they don't tell students is that these icons of evolution have been discredited, not by Christian fundamentalists but by mainstream evolutionists.

We now know that 1) Haeckel faked his embryo drawings; 2) Anatomically mutant fruit flies are always dysfunctional; 3) Peppered moths don't rest on tree trunks (the photographs were staged); and 4) the finch beaks returned to normal after the rains returned – no net evolution occurred. Like many species, the average size fluctuates within a given range.

This is microevolution, the age-old observation of change within species. Macroevolution refers to the evolution of fundamentally new body plans and anatomical parts. Biology textbooks use instances of microevolution such as the Galapagos finches to paper over the fact that biologists have never observed, or even described in theoretical terms, a detailed, continually functional pathway to fundamentally new forms like mammals, wings and bats. This is significant because modern Darwinism claims that all life evolved from a common ancestor by a series of tiny, useful genetic mutations.

Textbooks also trumpet a few "missing links" discovered between groups. What they don't mention is that Darwin's theory requires untold millions of missing links, evolving one tiny step at a time. Yes, the fossil record is incomplete, but even mainstream evolutionists have asked, why is it selectively incomplete in just those places where the need for evidence is most crucial?

Opponents of the new science standards don't want Kansas high-school students grappling with that question. They argue that such problems aren't worth bothering with because Darwinism is supported by "overwhelming evidence." But if the evidence is overwhelming, why shield the theory from informed critical analysis? Why the campaign to mischaracterize the current standards and replace them with a plan to spoon-feed students Darwinian pabulum strained of uncooperative evidence?

The truly confident Darwinist should be eager to tell students, "Hey, notice these crucial unsolved problems in modern evolutionary theory. Maybe one day you'll be one of the scientists who discovers a solution."

About the moths. http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/anne_coulter_cl_1.html

I will include a brief sample below, the entire article is much to0 long to post, at least that in my understanding of the rules. If I am incorrect someone please let me know.

But this is only part of the story, if you will bear with me for a moment. Kettlewell did several different experiments:

1. Direct observation and filming. Kettlewell and others observed birds eating moths directly off trunks of trees. This was done both in experiments in an aviary, as well as outdoor experiments in the polluted and unpolluted sites.

2. Camouflage rating. Kettlewell visually ranked the effectiveness of camouflage of moths on different backgrounds and compared the effectiveness of camouflage with predation rates both in an aviary and in the field.

3. Release-recapture experiments. Kettlewell marked and released both light-colored and dark moths early in the morning, and recaptured some the next night in both pheromone and light traps (using mercury-vapor lamps). In polluted woods, he and his assistants recaptured more dark moths than light-colored, whereas in unpolluted woods they recaptured more light-colored than dark coloured.

4. Geographical distribution. This is not an experiment per-se, But Kettlewell noted that the distribution of the dark moths in the country closely matched the areas of industrialization.

The release-recapture experiments are the ones that capture the most attention, but the direct observation experiments and aviary experiments also supported the results from the release-recapture experiments.

When the experiments were completed, Ford didn’t triumphantly announce the results. Instead, they were published by Kettlewell in peer-reviewed research journals, and then Kettlewell brought further attention to them via publications in Scientific American, and lecture tours. However, at no time did either Kettlewell or Ford claim that the observations “proved” evolution all by themselves, or that natural selection by visual bird predation was the only factor in the rise of the dark peppered moths (although it was considered the major factor). They did, however, note that they had experimental documentation of natural selection producing an adaptation in a wild population, and although such results are commonplace today, at the time it was one of the first instances of this kind of experimental work.

Indeed, when Kettlewell published his first, massive paper showing selective predation on poorly camouflaged moth forms in polluted woods the response was a bit ho-hum. It was his second paper, where famed ethnologist Nico Tinbergen actually filmed birds eating resting moths (and where the complementary data set, that dark moths were selectively predated in unpolluted woods was performed, along with a second replication of the study in polluted woods that addressed some criticism of the first study) that people sat up and took notice. Still, this didn’t stop people trying to replicate the data, in different localities and with experimental set-ups to address some limitations of the original studies. There have been at least 30 independent experimental replications of Kettelwell’s original experiments, and they all confirm his work.

Unfortunately for Coulter, Peppered moths do rest on tree trunks as well as branches (see also Howlett and Majerus, 1987). In fact, they rest all over the trees, although most prefer trunk postions underneath branches. Bernard Kettlewell, a keen naturalist, noted this explicitly himself in one of his papers, which is why in his release-recapture experiments he released the moths on trunks and branches. It’s in the original papers, which for some reason none of the creationists bother to read. (Coulter herself uses only newspaper accounts and flawed popular books such as Icons of Evolution for her sources, and did not go to the original work herself). No fakery was involved.

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